


Natural Discovery

by SylvanWitch



Category: Master and Commander
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:48:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There are many species of animals, including our own, that indulge in such natural pursuits."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Natural Discovery

Jack’s attention has scarcely strayed from the tent where Stephen lays recovering, but he somehow misses the man’s emergence into the brilliant sunshine of a new day.  Only when Blakeney says, “Good day, Doctor,” a greeting echoed throughout the busy camp, does Jack turn his eyes to behold his dearest friend.

 

He looks pale, Jack thinks, and then he scoffs at how ridiculous an observation he’s made.  As if the man could be anything but pale after his ordeal.

 

Briefly, a scene flashes across his mind, of bloody hands and lips caught wide in a panting grimace and of a breathy sound not unlike a trapped animal might make just before the life is squeezed from it by predatory jaws. 

 

The image unsettles him, which is the excuse he allows when he turns away from his work at the chart table to say, “Walk with me?” lightly, as if they are on holiday in Brighton, ladies fluttering by in white linen on a summer’s day, instead of surrounded on all sides by men who must muffle their surprise to see the captain and the surgeon moving off together across the blasted island.

 

“Haven’t you some _duty_ to attend?” Stephen murmurs, and Jack allows the bitterness—would allow Stephen almost anything ( _anything_ ) now.  An unaccustomed cold slithers into his belly and makes his laugh overloud.  Just when did Stephen come to mean so much to him that he would forsake everything—his honor, his duty, the sacred trust placed in him by God and King—for him?

 

About the time they’d shared a ghastly intimacy, for all that there were two other men in the room.

 

God, could he be jealous of Higgins’ hands, which had touched a part of Stephen that Jack himself had never imagined wanting to explore?

 

The creak of a strained rib, a hiss of agony echoes, and then he’s free of the image, back beside his dear old friend, hand at Stephen’s elbow to guide him over a rough patch of hard, black ground.

 

Jack should ask a question of the doctor, inquire after the flora and fauna, find something worthwhile to say that isn’t impudent or imprudent or both.  Instead, he asks, “Should we stop?” He intends solicitude but manages instead a sort of desperate jollity, and Stephen casts him a strange look, slant-lipped and askance.

 

“I’m fine, Jack.  You can let me go.”

 

Jack thinks that it is the one thing of which he is entirely incapable.  Again, cold stirs in his belly.

 

They walk awhile in stilted silence, the sound of combers and sailors and the business of beaching gradually diminishing behind them until there is only the cry of seabirds overhead and the ticking of some alien insect from a stand of shrubs to leeward.

 

When he can take it no more, Jack halts, Stephen following his example after a further few paces, casting a surprised look over his shoulder at his friend, eyes suspicious, as though he suspects Jack of having yet again changed his mind about collecting specimens here.

 

That suspicion hurts, for all it’s been earned, and Jack tries to find words of apology that won’t sound vacant of sense, coming as they do far too late for real meaning.

 

Instead, he catches his friend up and looks at him, at the quizzical cant of his eyebrows and the odd tilt of his lips, at the way he lifts his chin in challenge, though he cannot know what it does to Jack, that simple, so familiar gesture.  Before he can overcome impulse with better sense, Jack leans down and lets his lips linger on Stephen’s mouth, which opens slightly in surprised exclamation and as suddenly relaxes in obvious approbation of Jack’s boldness.

 

Deepening the kiss, Jack gingerly gathers Stephen into him, mindful of his wound but unwilling to let another moment pass without feeling against him the whole of Stephen’s body—his wholeness what Jack most doubted of, must absolutely affirm.

 

“Jack,” Stephen whispers, pulling only his mouth away.  “What is this, Jack?  Is it guilt?”

 

That even now Stephen should allow Jack some room to tack, an easy escape from what comes next, shames Jack, makes him feel acutely how little he deserves the good doctor’s esteem.  Still, he cannot make himself sacrifice what he has started, can’t seem to release his friend, let him go, though it would be better for them both.

 

“Nothing so base,” he assures Stephen, recovering his wits before he professes something far more dangerous. 

 

At his answer, Stephen smiles, a wry look, and lifts an eyebrow.  “There are many but a mile from us who would disagree with your definition, Captain.”

 

Jack shakes his head.  “I care little for what they think.”

 

“Less so for what they cannot know,” Stephen observes, capturing Jack’s gaze.

 

Ruefully, Jack nods.  “True enough.  Some may say it is unnatural.  I cannot be of that mind.”

 

“Why not?” Stephen queries, even as he’s urged to sit and then lie back against a hummock of lichen in the lee of a shrouding stand of shrubs.

 

“Well, surely _you_ should know, my good doctor,” Jack chivvies, moving to Stephen’s shirt and easing it from him with a gentleness that belies his intentions in this instance.

 

“I’m afraid I haven’t a clue, as usual, what you’re thinking, Captain,” Stephen answers.  His voice is gratifyingly breathy as Jack works his lips along Stephen’s throat, downward toward his nipples and across the sun-warmed expanse of his belly.  He lingers at the wound, not touching, merely breathing, feeling the heat of it as a ghost touch against his lips.

 

Beneath him, Stephen groans, skin twitching, and his broken, “Please,” encourages Jack to move on from that awful memento of Stephen’s frail mortality.

 

Looking up as he arrives at the evidence of Stephen’s need, Jack smiles, driving away the last shiver of fear at how close he’d come to losing this, losing him.  “Only that there are many species of animal, including our own, that indulge in such natural pursuits.”

 

“You’re a regular buccaneer,” Stephen gasps, twining his hands in Jack’s hair, pulling it free of the leather thong that usually binds it.

 

“Aye, that I am,” Jack agrees before laying a wet stripe along the length of Stephen’s filling cock.

 

“Jack,” Stephen says in a tone Jack has never heard before.  “Jack,” he says again, urgency and overwhelming love and something else—something like a promise—all bound up together in that one word.  Jack speeds his ministrations, touching the soft skin of Stephen’s balls, the tender spot behind them, seeking with a deft hand the places that will bring the man alive beneath him.

 

He feels the surge of life against his tongue as Stephen cries out and thrusts into his mouth and spills his seed.  Jack drinks it all down, sighing at the heat of it against the back of his throat and at the way this man, his best friend, his brother in all but blood, shudders under him and pleads with voice and hands and heavy pulse.

 

When he has lapped every drop from Stephen’s flaccid shaft, Jack releases him, rests his chin in the thatch of springy hair, and looks up the length of his body.

 

Stephen is looking back, face red, eyes wet, lips bitten.  He reaches a shaking hand toward Jack, the effort costing him a wince as he pulls at his stitches, and Jack obliges his friend, moving up his body to hover over him, hard and wanting but unwilling to ask anything of Stephen in return for what he’s just been given.

 

“Let me—,” Stephen starts, and Jack hushes him with a chaste kiss.

“I have what I most wanted,” Jack assures him, offering another, lewder kiss, teeth and tongue eating at Stephen’s still-panting mouth.

 

Stephen’s hands smooth down Jack’s back, steal under his vest and shirt, inducing gooseflesh as they stroke him.  Without meaning to, he drops his weight against Stephen, and Stephen spreads his legs, shifting so that Jack’s hard length is snug in the vee where his thigh meets his pelvis.

 

Jack’s eyes close at the sensation, at the way Stephen offers himself, wanton and willing, at his hands sliding down the back of his breeches, urging him to thrust.

 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he groans, every ounce of effort it takes to be still evident in the strain of his tone.

 

“You can’t,” Stephen promises.  “Never,” he adds, leaning up to trace the whorl of Jack’s ear with his tongue.

 

Undone, Jack moves, feeling Stephen’s breath stutter out of him at the weight of him and the sensation, shuddering as he whispers, “Jack,” into his ear, and as his hands grasp at his buttocks.

 

“God, Stephen,” he mutters, burying his hot face against Stephen’s sweat-damp neck.  “Stephen,” he says again, his hips increasing their rhythm, growing erratic as he feels the electric swell of pleasure overtake him.  “God,” he chokes out, giving a last, herculean thrust as he crests the wave and it crashes over him, the sensation wiping away for a moment every memory, every element of identity, leaving only two men, gasping and shuddering, a shared breath away from absolute annihilation.

 

When at last he comes back to himself, Jack recalls Stephen’s state and pulls hastily away, a motion that earns a protest from the doctor, who is half-asleep against the earth, eyes tracing his lover’s face even as a shaking hand comes up to touch Jack’s temple, his lip, his jaw, ghosting down to the gap in his shirt where his pulse still pounds erratically beneath his skin.

 

“Had I known that being wounded was what it would take to finally free you of your damned reserve, I might have tried it sooner,” Stephen says.

 

The unexpected admission wrings a bark of laughter from Jack, who shifts to his knees to take in the sight of his best friend, his brother, debauched and beautiful in the sunlight of this strange isle.

 

Tracing a lazy line down Stephen’s chest, on the way to put him snug away again, Jack smiles and shakes his head.  
  


“What?” Stephen asks, fond exasperation in his voice.

 

“I was only thinking that it will be harder now to order you about when I have this image of you in my mind.”

 

Stephen shifts up to lean on his elbows, bringing him closer to Jack, who is bent to the work of re-lacing Stephen’s breeches.  “You do not think I will use this against you?” 

 

His carefully incredulous tone brings Jack’s head up.  Jack’s expression must betray his feelings, for Stephen sighs out his name and shakes his head. 

 

“Surely you must know that I would never abuse your,” and here Stephen stumbles, managing “affection” only after a too-long pause.

 

“Better to call it love,” Jack answers, holding out his hands to help Stephen sit up so that he can slip into his shirt.

 

“Is it?” Stephen wonders, words so quiet Jack can only hear them because they are but inches apart.

 

“Aye,” he says, gathering his courage to show Stephen what he cannot say with words.  And then, because this is Stephen, his good doctor, whom he knows so well and has loved so long, Jack says _I love you_ in the only way he can, with a searing kiss that seals his compact.

 

Stephen’s answering kiss is enough to convince Jack that he hasn’t risked everything on a whim, that there is something definite and real here, something that might just sustain them through the rest of their days, come what may.

 

Once again on their feet, they stand for an indefinite moment, taking in the way the world looks now, so different than it had been only an hour before.  The blue vault of heaven seems kinder, the sun somehow muted in its glare.  The beads of sweat on Stephen’s brow, the wrinkles at the corners of his squinted eyes, the uncertain smile that flirts about his mouth—all of it appears as a new discovery to Jack, who has only just allowed himself to imagine what their future might be.

 

“Shall we find that bird of yours?” he ventures, gesturing toward the unexplored expanse before them.

 

“I think I’ve already discovered the best thing this island has to offer,” Stephen answers easily, smile spreading across his face.

 

“Still, it’s hardly the sort of thing the Royal Society publishes,” is Jack’s ready answer.

 

Stephen’s laugh startles a sound from some creature hidden in the undergrowth nearby, and his keen eyes dart toward the spot.

 

“Go ahead,” Jack urges with mock suffering.  “Find your prize.”

 

Stephen’s hand brushes across Jack’s back as he passes him, headed for the spot from which the sound had come.  “I already have,” he says, voice low and loving.

 

“As have I,” Jack answers, though the good doctor is already too engrossed to have heard him.

 


End file.
